Lose Yourself in Genre Classics over the Lost Holidays

I wonder, Is it too early for the holiday blues?

We thought we’d solved that problem when we inaugurated the tradition of choosing one book each to buy for Christmas, instead of exchanging expensive gifts with “exchange” written all over them.  

And so Christmas Present is smooth: it’s Christmas past that shatters you. Here are some examples:  the year someone said you looked fat in your thrift-shop black velvet skirt (you were thin but you cried), the year an aunt wrapped up leftovers for everybody except your mother (it was a sister-in-law war), and the year your uncle gave you arithmetic problems to solve at Christmas dinner because he’d mixed you up with a “mentally challenged” niece–AND THOUGHT THIS WOULD BE GOOD FOR HER.  (You protected her, at least, poor thing!)

And so let’s break out the non-alcoholic eggnog and stockpile genre books to lose ourselves in.  

HERE ARE TWO BRILLIANT GENRE BOOKS.

Stuart Palmer’s Four Lost Ladies (1948).  The tenth in Palmer’s Hildegarde Withers series, this charming mystery is fast-paced, humorous, and suspenseful. When Hildegarde Withers, an amateur sleuth, retires from her job as an elementary school teacher, she has too much time on her hands. She pores over statistics about missing women and theorizes that most  of them were murder victims. Her policeman friend is cynical about the stats, but Hildegarde is worried when she does not receive a Christmas card from her spinster friend, Alice. Hildegarde’s investigation links the disappearance of Alice to an apparent suicide of a wealthy spinster at a fancy hotel, and the disappearance of three other women who stayed there.  Hildegarde goes undercover, and with the help of her new sidekick, Alice’s niece, solves the crimes.

Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959).  This gripping, realistic novel about a nuclear holocaust in the U.S. is a neglected American classic—and one of the most terrifying books I’ve ever read. If you were riveted by Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, you will find Alas fascinating, because it deals not with the knowledge of impending death but with nearly unsolvable problems of survival.  Randy Bragg, a lawyer in Fort Repose, Florida, receives a telegram from his brother Mark, who is a colonel, ending with the words Alas, Babylon.  This is code to alert Randy that a nuclear war is imminent, and that Mark’s wife and children are flying from Omaha to Florida, where they may be safer.  The bombing itself is horrifying, as the flashes and mushroom clouds explode in cities all over Florida and the rest of the U.S., and Randy’s niece is temporarily blinded.  Fort Repose is not hit, but the problems—which include the end of electricity, finding food after canned supplies run out, finding unpolluted water, a cholera outbreak in a hotel because guests keep using toilets that no longer flush, the death of diabetics because there is no refrigeration for the insulin, medical supplies running out, the prevalence of highwaymen and murderers, and the necessity to carry guns.  Randy and a small group of neighbors band together, but they don’t even know who won the war.  Russia or the U.S.?

These days we fear climate change, but we used to be terrified by nuclear war (I had recurring nightmares).  In the following succinct passage, Mark explains to Randy what we’d be up against.

“There isn’t any place that’ll be absolutely safe. With fallout and radiation, it’ll be luck—the size of configuration of the weapons, altitude of the fireball, direction of the wind. But I do know Helen and the children won’t have much chance in Omaha. SAC Headquarters has got to be the enemy’s number one target. I’ll bet they’ve programmed three five-megaton IC’s for Offutt, and since our house is eight miles from the base any kind of near-miss does it—” Mark snapped his fingers—“like that. Not that I think it’ll do the enemy any good—command automatically shifts to other combat control centers and anyway all our crews know their targets. But they’ll hit SAC Headquarters, hoping for temporary paralysis. A little delay is all they’d need. I’ll have to be there, at Offutt, in the Hole, but the least a man can do is give his children a chance to grow up, and I think they’d have a better chance in Fort Repose than Omaha. So if I see it’s coming, and there is time, I’ll send Helen and the kids down here. And I’ll try to give you a warning, so you can get set for it.”

I raced through this well-written, distinctly American dystopian novel, and highly recommend it.

Any recommendations of other brilliant genre books?